Hello World

Disability benefits: "I mean, sure, there are probably some sad sacks who are gaming the system, there always are, but hell, with the amount of taxes we pay, the government can afford a few freeloaders, right? I'd rather pay for a couple people who don't really need it than not have the system at all for if I need it, or my kids do, or whatever. I mean shit happens. What if some asshole drunk driver puts me in the hospital and it takes me a year to get back on my feet? Or Heaven forbid something permanent happens. I'll sure be glad that I can get disability then, won't I?"

UBI: "I dunno, the kind of guy who'll just sit on the couch playing Call of Duty all day if he doesn't have to work, I kinda don't want him on my job site anyway. That type is just taking up a place that you could fill with someone who'll actually get the job done, you know? You end up short-handed even though you technically have enough people because everyone else has to pick up his slack. And it'd mean that if your boss is a dick you can tell him to shove it and not worry your kids are gonna go hungry while you find a better place. We can sure as hell afford it."

Jacek Yerka, Eruption 

i also think a lot of people aren't really getting the *point* of louis' reaction. it's extremely harsh and judgmental and completely insensitive to the fact that lestat is being abused, but that is the purpose of it. the entire season is lestat attempting to justify it. this is louis saying that you cannot justify it. there is no rational way to justify that happening. and when lestat has a breakdown over it, they both sort of realize at the same time that this means lestat has been suffering incestuous sexual abuse for 200 fucking years.

it overwhelms lestat, and it clicks for louis. that's when he changes tacts, when he comforts lestat, when he gently tries to help him admit that it's been abuse all along in the bar. it's so realistic, such a necessary sequence.

they're both deeply traumatised individuals who kicked into defense mode simultaneously after that tape was leaked.

lestat, who always knew something is off about his dynamic with his mother, wanted to justify it and not face the ire of louis' judgement cause that would make him see the truth of the matter. his own mother, the person who made him, doesn't love him.

and for louis, who was fed lies and had memories altered to the point his sense of self is fractured, who had to live and be intimate with a partner who hid information from him, had to once again find out his first partner, who also had a habit of lying to him, might've deceived him for over a century in this regard. its in his specific words about having her portrait over their coffins (marital bed). the mother looming over them was alive and was actually intimate with lestat in a way louis was. that is his point.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.